Henry Giroux: America Has Become Amnesiac

The mainstream press is hopeless and lost in its own fatuous discourse of accommodation. The recent claims that Trump acted presidential in his speech to Congress reminds me of how the mainstream press once fawned over the aesthetics that shaped Hitler's mountain vacation retreat. This is more than accommodation, it is an act of utter complicity driven by a lack of historical memory and any vestige of moral and social responsibility. I summed it up in my Violence of Organized Forgetting:

"America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed."

- Henry Giroux